Derrin Kent

I think the VLE concept has failed to deliver a little bit thus far… but it won’t fail us in the end….

As somebody who has engaged in social construct-driven online learning myself - on courses in which I have interacted with people living in working in other countries as far flung as India, Columbia and Romania, I know from first hand experience that an online learning environment (without any face-to-face contact amongst the learner group) is one in which people can:

• learn new things
• form their own hypotheses and test those hypotheses out with their peers (just as I am doing now in this blog posting)
• socialise and make new “friends”
• drop in and do their work at whatever time or place suits them best (flexibility for the learner)

I believe there are educational benefits to online learning:

• asynchronous online contributions (be they written, video or audio) require thought and have a sense of permanency about them. In the preparation of their contributions to a public forum, people will (often?) think carefully about what they are saying. It has a similar educational impact to that of telling learners they will be presenting in front of the whole class next week.
• Peer-peer interaction is more easily encouraged (for some) in an online setting. In a face-to-face setting, certain, more bombastic character-types can tend to shine. People who are often quiet in a face-to-face environment can turn out to be big contributors in the slightly more “anonymous” setting of an online learning environment. I believe that our different types of horses need to be given the chance to run on their preferred courses.

I also know that online learning can bring clear bottom-line and other practical managerial benefits to learning providers:

• a VLE provides an efficient means of reaching hard-to-reach learners
• there less need for training room contexts - God forbid that we should ever do away with face-to-face training but I think we tend to expensively overuse the classroom for “presentation” and “critical-thinking” time which could be more usefully left for “at-home” work. The classroom should be put to its most efficient use - as a place where course participants can talk through their pre-prepared ideas with others, present their findings to others, buzz, match a real face to their online “friends”.
• WBL providers could save a fortune in staff time and travel costs if they got their assessors delivering the train elements of and assess-train-assess cycle via their VLEs.

So, where are things going wrong?

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